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Archive for the tag “Jim Dale”

Recently, while doing some research for a friend, I stumbled upon a lady who makes professional-quality audiobooks. My first thought was that my clients, as well as my author friends, really need to consider making audiobook conversions of their manuscripts, as I’m a huge fan of audiobooks. I love the process of slipping a CD into my car stereo or hooking up my mp3 player to my car jack and listening to something while I am driving around town or on a road trip. In my family, we listen to audiobooks a lot. I have J. K. Rowling and Jim Dale to thank for getting us hooked on that format.

To get back to the point, I want to introduce all my readers to Francine, so without further ado, here she is: Read more…

Another holiday driving season is over- whew! – and it brought to mind just how much my children and I have enjoyed unabridged audiobooks.

I originally became a fan of audiobooks when my oldest son – now 18 – was 8 years old and we would make 10 – 12 trips a year across the state of Texas. Usually these trips were at least 8 hours and there is only so much you can do in a vehicle for 8 hours without kids getting bored, cranky, whiny or all three. To us, the audiobook of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” opened up a whole new chapter in our lives.

We would put in a cassette tape and be transported by Jim Dale‘s wonderful reading of this story. A story I might add that I was interested in, but had no urge to read if I had any free time. Suddenly the long, grueling trip was over too fast – we hadn’t finished with the story…

As soon as we got to our destination, Alex and I went to the nearest Wal-Mart and bought the 2nd and 3rd in the series – we were officially “hooked”!!

It’s hard to believe that was more than 10 years ago and during that time we have listened to all different types of books – Dan Brown, Janet Evanovich, Stephen King, Phillippa Gregory and of course every single J. K. Rowling!

There were 3 years that when my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday (when I was 30+ years old) I begged for the then soon-to-be-released “Harry Potter” on CD or “tape” – I wouldn’t even buy a new vehicle unless it had a CD/Cassette player in it.

Alex, James and now Savannah and I have put a lot of miles on vehicles and listened to lots of audiobooks. It is something we can do as a family, that encourages us to use our own imagination instead of a movie director’s vision for a story. I can say that we will be listening to our favorite books on our road-trips for many years to come.

Thank you for bearing with me on a post that had nothing at all to do with ebooks and letting me praise the audiobook. Next time you are taking a road-trip with your family, consider getting an audiobook from your library and having everyone listen. It is an experience that you wont regret and just might help foster your young one’s love of the written word – all 3 of my children love books. I highly recommend anything that Jim Dale reads as he does a fabulous job of separating the characters dialog.